How to do business, China-style

Made in China: What Western Managers

Can Learn from

Trailblazing Chinese

Entrepreneurs

by Donald N. Sull

with Yong Wang

Harvard Business School Press

231 pages, $49.95 For all the feverish headlines about China’s booming economy, the country remains an enigma for most of the world’s businessmen. But with the market for books on doing business in China inundated with new titles, where do you begin? Donald N. Sull’s entry is as good a place to start as any. It’s a book from which even veterans of the Chinese market can draw useful lessons.

What gives Made in China its special appeal is the way Mr. Sull combines carefully selected case studies of major Chinese companies and the entrepreneurs who lead them with a fairly systematic philosophy of how to do business in uncertain and unpredictable markets. It’s hard to know which came first — the philosophy or the case studies — but together they make a compelling argument for approaching business in China from a fresh perspective.

Mr. Sull, a former Harvard Business School professor who now teaches at the London Business School, is no stranger to the challenges of emerging markets. His previous writings on such places as Brazil have marked him as someone with a gift for distilling cogent management lessons from the experiences to be had in rough-and-tumble business environments.

The eight case studies he presents cover a wide range of businesses, from PCs, Internet portals and telecommunications, to home appliances, food and beverages. The individual entrepreneurs who are key to these remarkable Chinese success stories are virtually unknown outside China. Mr. Sull pulls back the curtain on these nimble risk-takers and tells their stories.

Take the Ting Hsin Group, parent of publicly listed Tingyi, and the tale of how the Wei brothers of Taiwan conquered China’s instantmarket. From its humble beginnings as a maker of cooking oil in Taiwan, the familycontrolled Ting Hsin Group made numerous unsuccessful efforts to crack the mainland market for everything from biscuits to egg rolls. Ting Hsin was on the verge of pulling out of the mainland in early 1992.

But then, on an 18-hour train trip from Tianjin to Beijing, the youngest of the Wei brothers, YinHeng, opened a package of instant noodles he had brought from Taiwan. “ The aromatic noodles attracted the attention of other passengers on the train,” Mr. Sull writes. It was, as Mr. Sull says, one of those “ Aha!” moments when a keen observation of local habits uncovers a golden opportunity invisible to headquarters.

Within 18 months, the company’s Master Kong noodles accounted for a third of the Chinese market, which itself accounts for half of the instant noodles consumed globally.

What Mr. Sull extracts from such stories is an approach to doing business that turns on its head many of the assumptions taken as gospel in today’s MBA programs.

Mr. Sull argues for what he calls the “ SAPE cycle,” where managers are required to sense, anticipate, prioritize and execute in rapid and continuous cycles in order to seize opportunities. Anyone who has done business in China knows that it is, above all, an unpredictable market.

David Plott is former editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review and deputy director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong.

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